I've been playing a lot lately, and I love the game. I just cant decide on which victory path is the best. I usually just end up flitting between all of them, and therefore lose most games. Any tips?
Diplomacy. Go Siam, Venice, or Greece then down the patronage tree while focusing on making as much money as possible. Everytime a city state gives a quest for donating money or double money rewards do it. Try to save a up a big nest egg for the end game so when the world election rolls around you can buy every city state out and win.
I've honestly just ignored city-states, mostly because I've never really taken the time to figure out how they work.
They can give you so much. If you have a few militaristic city state friends you don't really need to build an army, a few actually will give you unique units like winged Hussars or conquistadors. If you run patronage they will give you science. And faith city states make getting a religion early game really easy. In my opinion unless they have a strategic position you should never conquer them
Sweet, thanks for the heads up. I'm probably going to start a new game tonight and go for culture/diplomacy.
If you have Brave New World, go for a culture victory with Brazil. All you have to do is build things that give you great works slots and great artists/writers/musicians. Eventually, get archaeologists and start digging up artifacts. All you have to do is generate tourism without either getting surpassed or taken over. If you want to look at specifics, there's a few tutorials online about Culture Victories.
I've thought about buying Brave New World. Do you think it was worth it?
I really enjoy it. It adds all of this stuff to the game, which really changes how it plays. If you're unsure about picking it up, it goes on sale every now and then for pretty cheap - so you could always pick it up then.
I just finished Civilization V. Its a good game, and I really liked the end. I also thought that the changes to the skill system were positive. All in all, though, I found it disappointing for an http://www.kizifan.com . The first two games had a better story, were longer, had more intuitive puzzles, and a more organic game world (IMO). Still, I think its worth playing and, like I said, I like how it wraps up the series.
Venice, go for diplomacy. You don't need any micromanaging and getting Treaty Organization in the Freedom ideology makes you win the game easily on any difficulty.
The Shaka Impi train has only one stop. Domination.
Modded? Download the Reaper empire. Vanilla? Play lowest difficulty. (In all seriousness, though, it depends who you pick. The one thing to keep in mind is, when you pick, ACT like your leader - destroy everything with Khan, sell everything with Morocco, calm everything with Greece, outproduce everyone with Rome, pray everyone into submission with the Celts, research everything with Sweden).
Literally easiest way? Attila, Duel Map, Pangaea. Rush a couple of battering rams. Win by turn 50 most of the time. Other than that, science victory, especially as Korea or Babylon. Go tall with 3-4 cities and beeline science techs (other than getting composite bows early to defend yourself). You can usually get to be a full tech era ahead of everyone else by the end of the game, depending on difficulty, which also means that it's really easy to defend against their pathetic troops. Depending on the map you might be able to win earlier with military or culture victories, but they're less consistent and require more effort. If you don't want to choose a specific victory early on, Poland and Maya are good civ choices. Poland's ability is absolutely insane and adds up to a full policy tree by the end of the game, so if you do something you regret it's a lot easier to recover from or capitalize on it. Maya's bonuses are all very powerful as well: early archers, early science and faith, and a few free great people make for a very strong start to do whatever the hell you want.
I'd suggest taking up Oda Nobunaga (My favourite by far) and committing yourself to a purely military victory. This is quite the hassle, but once you find iron, you're practically unstoppable. However, another easy victory would be Science. I prefer military however. I once played on an Earth Map: Huge and the military victory was extremely satisfying. I'm currently playing on Earth Huge and have clocked in the custom player number to the max (24) and have placed as many city states as possible. Playing like that is fun. And I do believe the easiest victories in such cases are the Scientific Victories.
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I'd go for military.
Whenever I tried military, I always really enjoyed the satisfaction of successfully completing an amphibious invasion. Watching soldiers land on the beach was just so good.
Really, it will always depend on your civ and start location, but whatever you go for, population and science are essential. If you're near a couple weak civs early on and have iron handy, a domination victory is definitely an option. If you get a few policies early and start rolling culture, try to get great people to give you a boost. Basically, the key to winning is to adapt and lower the difficulty setting if needed.
I don't really know if it's the easiest way to win but i usually try to focus on science at much as possible